None of them boost network creation or collaboration governments. The best upgrades are the ones to Cryptology, Invisible Ink, Blueprint Stealing, Interrogation Techniques, and Passive Defense. Most of the time in vanilla you want to just get your initial 5 upgrades ASAP for +1 spy and then don't upgrade anymore until mid-late game when you have all the industry you need.
The best use of spies is to prepare collaboration governments or to steal industrial blueprints. Prioritize getting spies with safe cracker trait, then seducer. Having two spies with safe cracker will give you 100% chance of the bonus outcome for blueprint stealing, which is a 1-2 year ahead of time penalty reduction on top of the normal 300% research bonus. Having four spies allows you to run the "Steal Industrial Blueprints" operation on repeat after one "Infiltrate Civilian Government" operation, while maintaining your quiet intel network with the fourth spy(the spy maintaining the network should have Seducer). This will give either a free tech in one of industry, synthetics, and electronics, or a 300% research speed bonus if you already researched every technology the target nation knows in those categories. Doing this operation repeatedly will allow pretty much any country to max their industrial tech tree extremely early and snowball their factory count.
